Public Expenditures, Growth, and Distribution in a Mixed Regime of Education with a Status Motive

This paper tackles the issue of growth, distribution, and the provision of public services in a growth model with human capital accumulation where heterogeneous individuals decide whether to attend a publicly funded education regime or a privately funded one. Heterogeneity of individuals is introduced via their status-motivation which is shown to affect their choice of education. In such a framework, we obtain an inverted-U shaped relationship between growth and the size of the public education sector. In contrast with the general wisdom, we show that a larger public education sector is compatible with both a reduction of inequalities and an increase of long-term growth. Although we demonstrate that in a majoritarian system all individuals agree on a lower size of the public education regime than that which maximizes growth, our analysis also highlights the tension between the direct beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries from the public regime.